Eating With Sinners, Conclusion

I think I first began to appreciate the problem presented by American individualism, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with a family of eccentrics.  They had little or no connection to the small community where their house was located--they had picked the town, decades earlier, by throwing a dart at the map, and most of them had long since scattered across the country.  They had picked their religions with almost the same insouciance: one was a Buddhist, another an atheist humanist, another (the only apparently sane member of the tribe) an Episcopalian, and another--a girl I had known in graduate school--a Jew, and not merely a Jew but a rabbi.  Her college friends referred to her--with considerable affection--as the "space cadet."

The turkey had no sooner hit the table than the atheist uncle seized a plate, grunting “This for me?” and filling it with turkey and trimmings, walked over to the television set where he proceeded to engage in a quarrel with Walter Cronkite (too conservative) throughout the entire dinner, which after this rocky start went rapidly down hill.  The low point was reached when I was asked about contemporary poetry and replied that it was mostly written by small college professors who taught creative writing and blurbed each other's books.  When I asked the Space Cadet's husband what he did, he replied that he was one of those small college professors who taught creative writing....

To restore the meal to its proper place, we need not convert to Serbian Orthodoxy.  The Christian West has its own traditions, though most of us have forgotten them:  the Twelfth Night cake with the lucky coin that makes the finder the master of the revels; the bone-shaped cookies that Mexicans bring to the graves of their ancestors on All Souls Day; the St. Joseph’s altar of foods that is still popular among South Italians, who used to visit each other’s homes in a daylong  progressive dinner.  St. Joseph's Day is still a day commemorated with special doughnuts (and closed museums) even in modern Rome. 

Anglicans, Lutherans, and Catholics all have rich traditions to draw upon, and if churches were to quit poisoning parishioners with pancake-mix breakfasts, commercial pre-sliced corned beef, and supermarket sheet cakes confected of soybean oil and library paste, they might recover the real foods (to say nothing of the actual doctrines) of their religious traditions.

“He ate like a Christian” is ancient shorthand for being civilized, and eating like a Christian--like charity--should begin at home.  Paul refers repeatedly to Christian homes that are actually churches, and the Serbian tradition of krsna slava is a direct outgrowth of this early custom.  If every home is a church, blessed or prayed over by priest or preacher, then every family dinner becomes a sacred meal.  If your neo-pagan friends are embarrassed by the grace you say before meat, perhaps they may reflect on what they have lost.  Living and eating with non-Christians is, alas, a part of everyday life.  Ordinary Christians are not called upon to be monks or to separate themselves into settlements and fortified compounds into which no alien influence can penetrate.  Christ was the light of the world and not a tiny candle whose feeble rays are horded by a tiny band of followers.  When Clement of Alexandria advised against eating with pagans, he went well beyond Peter and Paul.

Early Christian apologists were understandably drawn to asceticism and to separating themselves from their pagan neighbors.  Clement (in his Paedagogus) makes the best case he can against eating well, but all he can cite in his defense are Scriptural prohibitions against gluttony and wastefulness--he is not so quick to cite the fatted calf slain for the Prodigal Son or the barbecued kids and lambs and oxen offered up so often in the Old Testament and offer scant comfort to vegetarians and puritans.  Food is, admittedly, only a means to an end:  “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” Nonetheless,  a good feast is not to be despised, even as a metaphor: “All the days of the afflicted are evil, but he hath a merry heart hath a continual feast.”

When Our Lord himself was rebuked by the scribes and Pharisees for eating with publicans and sinners, he told them, “I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance,” and when the same legalists and kill-joys complained that his followers did not fast, he did not deny that fasting was a good thing but told them that “so long as the bridegroom is with them, they cannot fast.”  Christians, therefore, commemorate the suffering and death of Jesus by fasting but to recall his life among us, we keep the feast.

Peter as an observant Jew should have been reluctant to eat with Cornelius, the God-fearing but uncircumcised centurion, but he had been given a vision of a great sheet on which were depicted all the beasts of the earth and fowls of the air.  “And there came a voice to him,, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.  But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.  And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

We fast, not because we are forbidden to eat meat or because meat is bad, but as a discipline, to deprive ourselves, temporarily, of one good thing that we may come to know a better one.  Eating lamb (or ham, if you are German or Polish) at Easter is a great joy, because we have longed for it throughout the long weeks of Lent, and also because, in commemorating the reality of the Lord who is always with us, we can taste of the mundane joys that foreshadow the spiritual joys that are prepared for the faithful.

John the Baptist, in calling for repentance, ate wild locust and honey, but Jesus, who is the bread of life, is seen eating bread, helping fishermen to a good haul (both in his earthly life and after his resurrection), feeding the multitudes on bread and fish, feasting on the paschal lamb.  His first recorded miracle takes place at the wedding feast in Cana, where he transformed water into excellent wine.  Some modern Pharisees reverse the miracle by turning the wine into grape juice or even water. 

Perhaps to make sure that we did not become too spiritual in our religion, the risen Christ appeared to his disciples in human flesh and in the village of Emmaus “he took bread and blessed it, and brake and gave to them,” and after “he was known in breaking of bread,” he appeared to them in Jerusalem and, to reassure them, he ate “a piece of a broiled fish and of a honeycomb.”  

Though there is many a gourmet who might long for a fresh grilled fish and a taste of honey, Clement twists this passage into a condemnation of boiled meat and elaborate sweets, as if nothing in Scripture is literally true.  I intend no disrespect to Clement, a pillar of orthodoxy and one of the earliest Fathers to embrace (albeit with moderation) the classical tradition.  In the sensuous pagan world, it made good sense to warn Christians against the temptations of the flesh, but we must also be on guard against the greater temptations of the spirit.  Gnostics, Arians, Jansenists, and Puritans tell us to despise the good life that has been given us and to pretend that we can be angels or gods.  We know that it was for us poor mortals that Christ our Lord was sacrificed for us.  “Therefore let us keep the feast.”